Initial vocational education and training in a second chance school in Andalusia (Spain): A case study

Abstract

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, school systems have confronted the dialectic between those increasingly widespread policies primarily aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency and other policies focussed on equity and educational and social inclusion. In this inherently contradictory scenario, in order to improve their inclusive capacity, school systems usually design programmes aimed specifically for delivery to their most vulnerable students. Paradoxically, these differentiated programmes can themselves produce or enhance outcomes of segregation. To highlight this dilemma, in this article, we present the case of a second chance Spanish school, which has developed an alternative educational model explicitly intended to reduce these effects. Specifically, we analyse its Initial Vocational Education and Training Program, which is constructed for those students who, given their problematic scholastic trajectory, do not have even the possibility of completing lower secondary education. As a result, they run a serious risk of early school leaving, of unemployment and of social exclusion. Although this is a single case study, the model developed by this school offers various pedagogical alternatives to conventional programming that could be applied, with appropriate adjustments to local circumstances, in other national and international contexts.